You are right on point with the MS integration. It is needed and it is available now from 'other vendors'.

Take a look at www.JiveSoftware.com for integration between a Gartner Social Business Magic Quadrant leading vendor (Jive) and MS Outlook, MS Office and MS SharePoint. The integration is done very well, from my perspective.

Yes, and those "other vendors" are missing the point. They don't integrate their social platforms with the most widely used and dominant Office platform.

The upside benefit of connecting Social and Office is the plausible scenario where you can crowd source a solution to a business need and get results from your peers around the world in a hurry. Of course, today you can do this to some extent using pure technologies like search (Google, Bing, etc.) or social (Facebook, Google+, or Twitter).

I see integrating Social with Office tools as a way to research and connect with others in an infinite number of ways that we cannot easily do right now.

Corrected headline - Microsoft "PROMISES" to Bolsters Ties Between Yammer, Office 365 SOMETIME LATER IN 2013. There are other vendors already successfully delivering integrated social business platforms for several years, based on social networking technology, not document repository technology.

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